Oct. 23 -- VICTORVILLE, CA -- The City Council recently approved mutual and automatic aid agreements with San Bernardino County Fire. It was the latest in a series of public-facing moves to ready the relaunch of the city-run Fire Department.
In recent months, the city has finalized a dispatch services with CONFIRE, expanded its fleet, introduced a fire chief in council chambers and solidified a nine-month contract with County Fire as a holdover until the second quarter of 2019 when the Victorville Fire Department effectively goes live.
But much of the groundwork has been laid outside the public purview.
"Those types of pieces have to be done behind the scenes," said Fire Chief Greg Benson, who was hired in March.
Other top-level staff positions have been filled, including the division chief and three battalion chiefs. Since late September, conditional offers have been extended to 16 captains and 15 engineers, according to a city-provided transition timeline.
Interviews for the department's 21 firefighter/paramedics were underway and all suppression personnel were anticipated to begin immediately after the New Year — nearly three full months prior to launch date.
"Before March 30, I need those guys that are going to be working in those stations to know that neighborhood," Deputy City Manager George Harris II said. "They need to know that community."
Benson, who last oversaw the start of a fire department in Illinois, said there was no immediate data on how many candidates were local versus outside the region. Yet anecdotally, he noted that a significant number of captain candidates had begun their careers with the Victorville Fire Department, which disbanded in 2008 when the city pivoted to the county for contract fire services.
In a sit-down interview last month, Harris II and Benson said recruitment has been the main priority, evident by completed hires, and the transition was ahead of schedule. It has been intentionally expedited — battalion chiefs were brought on two weeks in advance — to account for any potential hiccups. At the time of that conversation Sept. 19, neither said there had been any major roadblocks.
Cast as purely a cost-saving measure, and more recently as an opportunity to institute a Day 1 intra-department culture, the nearly year-long transition will continue through November with emergency medical services coordinator interviews, start date for a fire marshal and suppression personnel background checks.
But the process also hasn't been entirely smooth.
City officials have been forced to address along the way rumblings that they would close a fire station — Benson and Harris said they won't — and that the projections of 5-percent annual savings and $3.8 million in reduced spending over five years will actually come to fruition.
It also has not been lost on city officials that they plan to hire 63 new employees even as mushrooming pension obligations hurt cities throughout the state. But Harris has said the city's CalPERS retirement system rates are far more affordable than the county's SBCERA, underscoring that pensions were an emphasis in the switch and not ignored.
County Fire union officials have persistently pushed back against the transition. Jim Grigoli, president of Local 935, reiterated Monday that union officials believe there are indicators that the city department will cost more.
"It's just a matter of opinion," he said. "Nobody really knows that until after you start something."
The union has most recently launched ProtectVictorville.com, and Grigoli said it was not meant to act as part of some anti-transition campaign. The website includes an FAQ that addresses key factors of the switch and rejects certain city conclusions.
"The reason we're doing the outreach," he said, "is just to let the people know the level of service that we provided."
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